In the other, you ride out on a wilful horse to do battle with huge, mournful monsters made of stone and moss.
In one, you escape a vast crumbling citadel while protecting a ghostly companion. These are games that seem on the brink of saying so much, but in fact leave you endlessly desperate to know more. They hint at a world rich in stories and emotion and human meaning, while delivering taut, ingenious, melancholic adventures that hum with classy restraint. Ico and Shadow of the Colossus aren't just classics - they're classics that do a very specific thing. Oh yes, and heir to two of the most fondly remembered games of the last 20 years, as well. The true puzzle was: what is this animal thinking?Īctually, it was probably more like 30 minutes.Īnyway, this is The Last Guardian: long delayed, sometimes pseudo-cancelled, shifting between platforms, glimpsed in brief, unconvincing snatches of action at trade shows many moons apart. Commands came together with body language, orders with their interpretation, and the true puzzle didn't lie at the bottom of the pool, because it was right up on the surface all along. It was an instance in which I had to try to properly engage with another creature, as wilful, playful, and easily distracted as I am. It was something else entirely, something much rarer. This wasn't an instance in which the game was too clumsy to bring its pieces to bear effectively. Genuinely: it was fascinating to watch the face, the body language, the shifting Baba Yaga chicken feet of that beast I was travelling with as it struggled to understand what I was asking of it - and then struggled to decide if it was in the mood to help anyway. You know that part in a game where you understand what you have to get to happen to solve a puzzle, but you can't make the puzzle pieces behave? I was stuck inside that part - except, while those parts are traditionally maddening, this time it was anything but.
For 20 minutes my companion would not do as I asked.
For 20 minutes last Wednesday I stood by an expanse of cold water, in an ancient hall that had become home to a vast, lapping pool, and I tried to get my companion, a three-storey motley of house cat, pigeon, and other assorted wildlife, to dive to the bottom, battling the swift waters that I couldn't face, and taking me along for the ride. The worst moments are sometimes the greatest moments. Does the successor to Ico and Shadow of the Colossus live up to its lineage? It does so much more.
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